“How can I help you, Sergeant?” Terasta’s hand was abruptly off Eshe’s shoulder, abandoning him in the midst of her camp.
The lead Wasp raised an eyebrow at finding a woman in charge. “We want the Weaponsmaster.”
Terasta nodded. “You want her; we want her.”
The sergeant squared his shoulders. “We know she came this way. Don’t play games.”
“I never do,” the woman replied, unintimidated. “I have papers authorising me to hunt fugitives from Imperial justice.”
Eshe looked about him, finding that nobody seemed to be paying him all that much attention. He began a slow shuffle away from the camp’s centre, edging towards the dark beyond the fires.
“I piss on your papers, woman,” the Wasp sergeant snapped.
“Interesting,” Terasta remarked thoughtfully. The transition from her standing there and her sword clearing its scabbard to cleave between neck and shoulder, was swifter than Eshe could follow, and yet so natural that it seemed rehearsed. The Wasp let out a gurgling yelp and went down, and then the fighting started in earnest, and Eshe ran.
He got quite far, hopping and stumbling over the broken countryside, his Dragonfly eyes wringing as much light from the waning moon as he could manage. He thought he was clear of them, the sounds of battle receding until they became someone else’s problem.
Then he skidded down a scree slope, fetching up against a jutting rock hard enough to beat the breath from him, and Terasta stepped around it and took his arm again, as though she and he had been following the steps of the same dance.
Eshe struck at her with his free hand, but she twisted his arm above his head, driving him to his knees.
“I approve of your instincts, boy,” she said softly. “Any other time they’d have been right on the money. But this is where I wanted you. Right here.” She cocked her head, listening as the sounds of the fight were carried on the breeze.
“Your people are losing,” Eshe spat at her. It was anyone’s guess whether it was true.
“Probably. But they’re a pack of killers, thieves and deserters fighting a squad of equally greedy soldiers. Why should we spare any tears?” She shrugged. “My scum have served their purpose, in getting me this far and fending off the others who wanted Insekae’s head.”
A new voice growled out, low and dangerous, “And you think you’ll collect it, do you?”
Ineskae had intended to avoid the bloody skirmish between the Empire and her hunters, but somehow she had ended up going through the middle of it, her sword and the dregs of her drunkenness just drawing the shortest possible line between her and Eshe and then cutting along it. There was blood weighing down her robes, mostly other people’s. Her souvenirs were a thin line of red above one eyebrow and a ragged gash across the back of her left hand.
The Wasp woman regarded her coolly. “I’m not here for any reward,” she said. “I’m here for you.”
“Personal, is it?” Ineskae squinted. “I don’t know you.” She was tensed, ready to strike, sword and mind finding her a dozen solutions to the problem: kill the woman, not the boy. Eshe’s eyes were burning on her.
“I know you, Weaponsmaster,” the Wasp woman told her. “I have heard more stories of you than you probably know exist. I know everything of you, your history, your victories, your provenance.”
“And how?” Ineskae demanded scornfully.
“Aleth Rael.” The Wasp smiled tiredly, letting go of Eshe, abruptly nothing more than a shabby mercenary in ill-fitting armour. “Aleth Rael, old woman.”
Ineskae was very still. “How dare you speak his name?” she whispered.
“Because he was my teacher.”
“You? A Wasp?” Her fury was automatic, and also hollow. There was something new come into Terasta’s voice, an earnestness beyond her studied poise. Ineskae was practically spitting with insults, desperate to keep this confrontation as something simple: just another throat to cut. And yet no words came out. Her sword trembled in the air between them, fighting her, and her hand was stayed.
“I am Terasta of the Empire, and I was his student while he lived.”
“Impossible,” Ineskae got out. “Where’s your badge?”
“I never had the chance to earn it,” the Wasp said bitterly. “The war came. He went home to fight for his people, and against mine. And then he died.”
“Yes.” Something vital went out of Ineskae. Abruptly neither she nor her sword had the heart to continue their struggle.
“And I knew I should have been with him,” Terasta added, “even if it meant killing my own kinden. I failed him.”
“Yes,” Abruptly Ineskae tottered over to a flat stone and sat down. “Yes,” she said again. “But here you are.”
“He left me with one thing only,” the Wasp said. “He left me with his memories of you, the woman who gave him everything. He loved you.”
The old Mantis looked at her bleakly. “So why are you here? To give me his fondest best wishes?” Eshe had retreated to her, half hiding behind her, and she reached up to him. His hand in hers was like a lifeline in a world that was draining away.
“I have tracked you. I have followed your path from fight to pointless fight,” Terasta told her. “You are looking for death. A proper death. A Weaponmaster’s death, worthy of the sword and circle badge. And you can’t find it. Not here. Not any more.”
“Seems that way,” Ineskae grunted. “You’re going to give it to me, are you?”
“If I can. Because I understand the sword and circle, even if I never earned it for myself.”
The old Mantis stared at her. Wasp-kinden weren’t noted for any kind of honour that the fallen Commonweal might have recognized, but she saw it in Terasta: the stillness, the calmness; a woman whose life had been given over to the sword for its own sake, and not merely for what that sharp edge might win. Something rose in her at the thought: a proper fight, a final fight, a dignified exit from a world that no longer wanted her.
Her sword and her badge desired that. She had used them badly, since the war’s end. They wanted rid of her.
But she was damned if she was their plaything.
“No,” she said softly.
The Wasp started in surprise. “But... all this time, what have you sought, except this?”
“I know.” Ineskae closed her eyes, feeling out this new thing she had discovered within herself as though it was an arrowhead too barbed to draw out. So I have to push it on through. “I thought so too, until now.”
“Then what changed?” Terasta demanded, bizarrely infuriated that all her good work and planning had apparently been in vain.
“You took him.” Ineskae squeezed Eshe’s hand gently. “And I wanted him back. It was the first time I wanted anything that wasn’t a drink or a death since the war. It was meaning.” She managed a brittle smile. “And you did the right thing, by Aleth Rael, by me. You were right on all counts. And if you want to draw your sword and try your luck, I don’t reckon I can stop you. Only now I’m not ready to go. Now I’ve got other business to deal with.” It was absurd, she knew. She was too old, too worn down, and yet somehow she felt younger than she had in a long time. Somewhere in that flood of feeling was the ghost of the woman she had been back before Rael died, back when she had something to care about.
Terasta was looking completely lost. She had come a long way, engineered so much, and played by all the right rules, and now what did she have? “I don’t understand,” she complained. “What is the boy to you, really?”
“Who knows?” Ineskae stood, feeling her joints creak. “Maybe it’s time I took another student. Can’t let the old ways die out just yet, can we?” She weighed the thought in her mind, feeling a tentative and probationary approval from her sword, from her badge. “I could take two, maybe.” Her gaze was still red-rimmed and wild, but it was steadier than it had been in a long time.
For a long moment, Terasta stood frozen, hand partway to her sword hilt, world yanked out from under her.
And Ineskae saw that the woman’s hunt – her relentless pursuit of her teacher’s teacher – was indistinguishable from Ineskae’s own quest for self-destruction: differing strategies to deal with an identical void.
“I will fight you, old woman,” the Wasp said flatly, and Ineskae sighed, waiting for the strike, but then Terasta’s shoulders twitched, the smallest shrug. “But not until you are ready,” she added. “Until then, it would be an honour and a privilege to learn.”
Then there were voices calling amongst the rocks, the survivors of the Imperial soldiers spreading out to search for their elusive quarry. Ineskae consulted her sword and her badge, but they felt no need to go and shed more Wasp blood today. There was no hurry to go picking fights, now that she had so much else to do.
Fairyland
Jan Siegel
First of all, there wasn’t a door. Just a thicket of shrubs in a woodland hollow, a sudden space where the branches drew back, arching over and binding together in a net of twisted stems. Birds did not come there, though they might have nested in secret beneath the leaves; insects skittered away from the gap; the small creeping things down in the leaf mould would flinch if they approached too near, and scuttle back the way they had come. Once in a while some creature in flight from a predator would cross the unseen boundary, and the pursuer would halt on the brink, and sniff the air, and gaze in bafflement after his vanished quarry. People did not know the place, not then, for people were few and far between. But when the village came, pushing back the trees, and the children invaded the borders of the wood, they would pause on the hollow’s edge, feeling the hairs rise on their skin, and dare one another to go further.
One day there was a child who did not return. Then the wood had an ill name, and the children were kept out, and the people left gifts of flowers and food to placate the fairy folk who might steal their infants away. Scavengers ate the food, the flowers rotted, and only the village idiot went under the shadow of the trees.
O’Driscoll the blacksmith did not believe in fairies, or so he said, but he had a young wife, Bridie, who was pretty in the fairy-fashion, light-limbed and long-necked, with woodland eyes and hair as fine as mist. The birds came to her hand to be fed, and the hare did not run when she drew near, and the village idiot would sit with her beneath the trees and talk to her in a language only they could understand. In the tavern of an evening the tosspots and troublemakers would whisper about her, saying she and the fool did more than talk, and O’Driscoll heard the whispers, while he drank and brooded on his wife and her strange ways. Then he tossed the tosspots over his shoulder, and threw the troublemakers into the street, all without even shortening his breath, for he was a strong man. But afterwards he went home and brooded more darkly than before.
Bridie tried to please him in little ways, not comprehending what disturbed him, for she didn’t listen to the talk of troublemakers and scandalmongers, and the whispers had passed her by. She loved her husband despite his moods, and was kind to all creatures; she was one of those who saw no wrong. So she cooked his favourite foods for him, and sang softly about the house to ease his heart, and she did not see the demon inside him, murmuring that thus the guilty behave to hide their guilt.
There came a day when O’Driscoll looked for his wife and she was gone. He did not know that the fool was ill in the priest’s house, and Bridie there to nurse him; he was too proud to ask her whereabouts from anyone. He ran to the wood, and under the arms of the trees, blundering among the shadows, calling her name. Presently he came to the hollow, and he saw the branches curving around the doorless space, and only more hollow beyond: a place where the sun never reached, and the fallen leaves had gathered and rotted for year upon year, and the little darknesses had settled among the leaves, and the loose ends of a spider’s web blew untenanted though there was no breeze, and the toadstool caps thrust upwards like the hats of tiny imps spying on the intruder. Evening was drawing in, and the wood grew dim; a bird screeched in warning, but O’Driscoll paid no attention. The darkness oozed from under the leaves like a miasma, and the many-legged crawlers on the woodland floor were still, fixed in their place, and out of the rustling silence came the pipes, faint as the wind’s whisper, wilder than birdsong. Within the pipesound there were words, spellwords calling, calling, and O’Driscoll followed them like a man summoned, down into the hollow, and under the arching stems, which grew to swallow his height, and then the wood was gone, and his feet trod a stony pathway into a waking dream.
The path descended into a valley of rock, a valley so deep it might have been at the bottom of the world. On either side there were red cliffs too high to guess, and the sky was narrowed to a vein of blue, and the path wound down and down into the red dimness. Then at last the valley began to widen, and the sun found its way in, a low, slanting sun carving the rock with shadows, etching strange shapes sculpted by the wind, which might have been forms, or faces, or nothing at all. There were pools on either side of the path, many-coloured against the rufous tint of the rock: scarlet and citron yellow and turquoise and acid green. He drew close to one and peered down; it seemed to be very deep, and steams rose from the surface, stinging his eyes, so he retreated, following the path downward, always downward. A bird like none he had ever seen before flew up from somewhere nearby, circling in the steams. Its beak was curved like a sickle and its feathers were many-coloured like the pools and sparks trailed in its wake. It seemed to have no song, only a thin weeping cry. And always there was the pipe-music, drawing him on.
Presently he saw the piper, not far ahead, a shape emerging from the rock-shapes, shadow-moulded and patched with shadows, appearing and disappearing among the whorls and ridges of stone. A shape that leaped and danced and spun, cheeks swollen with the puff of its breath, fingers flying along the multiple pipe-stems – three, four, five, he could not count –limbs hairless or hairy, feet cloven. Stubby horns seemed to thrust up from its skull, and its eyes were dark in the sunlight, and red as blood in the shade. And the pipe-music made words in O’Driscoll’s head, calling and calling him on.
Come to the valley of Azmodel,
to the country beyond the door!
Follow the piper that pipes the spell –
the call of the sea in the whorl of a shell –
the high road to Heaven, the low road to Hell –
loreley, lullaby, philomel –
dance in the footsteps of Samael
to the kingdom of Nevermore!
Come to the country of Stolen Dreams –
to the garden where roses blow –
to the rainbow lakes where the moonshine gleams –
the phoenix soars in the rising steams –
the starfire melts in the sun’s first beams –
the lily weeps and the mandrake screams
on the road to the World Below.
As it is in certain dreams, which appear so real that they thrust all other realities aside, so it was for O’Driscoll in the valley of stone. He forgot the woodland and the hollow, the village with its tosspots and troublemakers; this was the only world he knew. The cliffs on either side receded, and suddenly – he wasn’t quite sure how – he was in a garden. It reminded him a little of the garden at the manse, with its rose-grown arches, twisty paths and tangled flower-beds and the topiary rambling out of shape. But of course he had no clear memory of the manse: all that remained was an echo of something lost and familiar, an eerie distortion of a place long gone. Strange plants had been clipped and coaxed and coerced into unnatural forms, cloisters and colonnades of greenery, sprouting cupolas, writhing columns of intertwining stems. Flowers poked out, some like little mouths, pink and pouting, others with protruding stamens and petals spotted as if with blood. Bush and box-hedge had been trimmed into the form of animals and demons. Insects, or things which might have been insects, buzzed and zoomed to and fro, moving too quickly for him to see them plainly, but he thought he glimpsed a dragonfly with a reptilian head, a moth with the body of a sylphid, a
hornet with the face of a malevolent imp. And still the piper danced in front of him, and leaves flew off branch and twig to whirl around the leaping figure, and insects with iridescent wings spiralled above its head.
The sun was sinking into the valley’s throat, a blood-orange ball swallowed up in the crack between leaning walls of rock. The lastlight melted into long shadows which came racing towards him, engulfing the garden in a wave of dusk; many-coloured fireflies emerged to swirl about the piper, and all around O’Driscoll there were rustlings and murmurings and the tapping of fairy feet. He thought he saw wisps of darkness detach themselves from root and tree-bole, rising upward into willowy forms which gathered about him and wove themselves into a pattern of airy dance-steps and floating limbs. Other shadows slid from under shrubs, from empty archway and spiny thicket, thronging round him in a crowd he could hardly see. He felt himself pushed and pulled into the dance, though no hands touched him. Capering, reeling, stumbling, he was drawn onward, following the phantom procession as it wound through the garden, chasing the last green traces of sunset before they were consumed in the cleft ahead.
The ground sloped slightly upwards and his feet trod on broad steps of polished stone. Then there was a circle of pillars, perhaps twenty yards in diameter, perhaps thirty; in the afterglow of twilight and his bewilderment of mind he could not tell. The ghost-dancers wound between the pillars, fading like smoke into the dimness, but the piper passed within, and O’Driscoll followed, finding himself beneath a huge dome set with star-gems which twinkled and faded like the unseen stars in the sky above. There was an altar on the far side with a stone idol squatting over it which looked ancient and misshapen, gnarled lips twisted into the parody of a smile, eyes narrowed under a knobbled brow. Twin basins of eternal oil burned on either hand.
The piper bowed before the idol, then blew a riff of notes unlike any he had yet played, piercing and unearthly as the call of a night bird in a birdless desert. And the idol moved. The heavy head lifted; balefire glared from the narrow eyes. The gnarly smile widened into a rictus, crumpling the stone cheeks, and something like a bellow issued from between malformed lips. The twin flames flared upwards. As if conjured, the phantom throng returned, pouring between the pillars into the circle of the temple. In the sudden light they seemed to grow more solid, becoming sprites with narrow faces all hunger, sloe-eyed, sly-eyed fauns, bogles and boggarts, goblins and grinnocks, and other beings even stranger: grotesques with random limbs, a mouth like an anus, an anus like a mouth – morlochs, pugwidgies, jikininkis, moguai. Outside the temple it was now altogether dark. The pipe-music grew shriller as the motley troupe cavorted around O’Driscoll, making obeisance to the altar even as they danced. The call of the spell was no longer the wind’s whisper but a chorus, wild and triumphant.
Legends Page 21
